The search for immortality has plagued humanity since the dawn of time. The only certain thing in life is death: we can run from the Reaper but we can’t hide. Eternal life, or the lack of, remains a problem that scientists and philosophers alike have failed to solve for millennia.

For centuries we have gone to extreme lengths to prolong our life, but so far physical immortality has eluded us. With drugs and surgery — and leeches and the warm blood of animals! — we can maintain the illusion of youth for decades, but evading death itself has proven a little trickier.

Enter religion with its universal theme of immortality of the soul, or in some cases reincarnation — the best get-out-of-jail-free card ever. ‘Hey, we can’t grant this body of yours eternal life, but how about another go if you mess up?’ The single most wished for trait of all time, that which all humans crave — more than wealth, or happiness, or progeny — immortality became available at a low low price of a few Hail Marys or donation to the church of your choosing.

Immortality: the frustratingly-close mirage, finally within reach! Trample each other as you try to get to it first; God doesn’t mind. Anyone can have it, at the price of your dignity and a handful of coins; who cares if you live this life in squalor, while a fat priest sleeps soundly, resplendent in his gold-trimmed vestments — there’s always the next life! A helpful, portly priest once told me that there’s surround-sound TVs in Heaven; The Kingdom of God, Araboth, Nirvana. In the old days there was obviously lots of black slaves, and taverns with lots of beer — and quaffing! — and Valkyries. But today, that doesn’t sell so well…

I wouldn’t be quite so pessimistic if all religions could at least agree on one common theme — immortality of the soul or reincarnation — but as they can’t seem to agree, and kill each other over the minutiae, it’s likely that none of them are right. God himself seems to vary a lot from religion to religion, and if you can’t agree on something as basic and omnipresent as God, what’s the point? Were the gods of ancient history (there were hundreds of them!) fake?

That’s the problem with a divinely-inspired canon – words, from the infallible mandible of God – if you disprove just a single facet of it, one breathlessly intoned phrase of God, the entire thing falls to pieces. So if the tribal shaman got it wrong about their deities, and the Greek priests got it wrong about their polytheistic Parthenon, why should we believe modern-day monotheistic religion? You can read a little more about my views on monotheistic religion, if you like, but that’s enough for this entry.

If you take God and paid-for immortality out of the equation what do you have left? A moral code of conduct and a few archaic rules that (sometimes) made sense in the religion’s hey-day: a moral code then, and not much else.

But wait… there has to be something to it. Unless humanity really has fabricated a belief in the supernatural (and geneticists will argue that this is the case) for the past 10,000 years, there has to be some truth in it all. What if we take God or any ‘higher power’ that we are subservient to out of the equation, and just leave the spiritual side of things? Current science is leaning towards something, a quantum force created by particles either millions of times smaller than atoms, or by something else entirely. We might never know what that force is, but the mere fact that there’s something outside the realm of empirical measurement — the most common argument against the existence of a spirit or soul — will certainly be a tricky one for scientists.

Physical immortality is just around the corner, or at least you’ll soon have new organs grown at a whim. Bust your heart? Buy another one — it might be grown inside a pig, but who are you to complain? You’ve probably seen or heard about the mouse genetically engineered to grow an ear on its back. There are projects working on the important biological aspects of aging (cell aging being the main one), but there are other caveats too. Is it ethical for us to live forever? Do we have the technology and the resources to sustain 40, 50, 60 billion people here on Earth? Perhaps most importantly: would we do anything today if we could always put it off until tomorrow?

It’s at times like this I wish I could remove myself from the equation. I have beliefs which interfere with my objectivity! It’s awfully hard to derive a solution or even an answer when my flesh-and-blood brain has to be consulted first — my brain which has been meddled with by my parents, my friends and the media. It’s comforting to know that everyone else suffers the same fate though; even philosophers had to grow up. It’s impossible for me to claim there’s a world beyond our own, but if science and technology has shown us anything in the last 50 years: don’t place any bets.

If we could give birth to a fully-grown adult — a test-tube human born into physical and mental maturity, without any of the pain or suffering sustained in childhood — how would they view the world? Without bias and with complete and utter objectivity, some pieces of the universal puzzle might just slip into place.

If immortality yet again slips between our greedy paws, we still have transhumanism to look forward to: augmented human bodies. Bionic eyes, mithril exoskeletons and steam-powered muscles — well, perhaps not so much the mithril or the steam-power, but it’s coming! I’ll talk about that after Terminator 4: Salvation hits the cinemas.

25 Comments

you ask if it’s ethical to live forever…and I don’t know, but I lean towards “no”.

I know I wouldn’t want to live forever. It takes away the meaning behind what we do. What does it matter if your evil? There’s no threat of eternal damnation hanging over you…but by the same token, I don’t necessarily believe the heaven and hell stuff…there’s no way to prove to me that either exist so odds are they don’t…but if they do I guess I’ll find out when I get to either. And I would also argue that living forever might actually BE eternal damnation…hmmm Actually it would still matter if your evil because society would still be there and I find that evil people don’t function well in society. And though you can live forever…does that mean you can’t be killed by say a wayward piano falling out of a building or a mass murderer?

The title turned out to be rather fitting because a) it’s also one of my favourite songs, and b) I went to watch We Will Rock You last night…

It’s not actually that Goddy… and it’s worth more than just a quick skim! I don’t DO God either. Mary Magdalene maybe…

If you were Terminator, Chele, you’d have no FEELINGS. At least… well… that’s something that needs to be discussed. Do robots dream… CAN robots dream. Hm.

Hannah, there are some religions that think that being here on Earth is ‘hell’ — Buddhism is one example, where reincarnation isn’t actually a boon, it’s kind of… just another go around the merry-go-round. Eventually you reach Nirvana, which removes you from the repetitive cycle. The problem is, there is almost certainly many more planets out there with life on… and there is probably spirit/souls/whatever on THAT planet too…

It’s all too big to try and comprehend, and this brain of mine won’t let me think far enough outside the box.

If everyone did live for ever, culture might be very different — so different that we can’t imagine what it’d be like. There MIGHT be no thievery or murder or adultery — we just don’t know… When you realise you can’t die, I think a lot of choices you make would be different!

I think attrition is bad and I’m not even a theist. But immortality wouldn’t remove all reasons for attrition–surely we’d have to rededicate Australia as a penal colony, since criminals would be immortal as well. Immortal life in prison. That’s hell.

Seb, if you were to grow said test tube man, he’d come out with a child’s brain, if you’re lucky. You couldn’t hope to form a fully mature person without the experience of growing up–these things are necessary to create a functional brain. When a child is locked away for years, tortured or no (something that is known to shut down brain growth), speech is never learned or learned properly, and the development of the brain is stunted. Feral children, when found, are known to almost always be stuck at the developmental level of a toddler, and rarely can they progress beyond the abilities of a bright chimpanzee.

Your perfect man is either a mental stump, or you program him with a perfect childhood, and then have to contend with whether or not a heartbreak at fourteen is good or bad, whether a skinned knee made him learn to do whatever. You get my point. There’s no way to raise a human being without experience, and there’s no way to judge what experiences are purely good and bad. We’re made of the things that break us.

I know what you posed was rhetorical, but it’s completely impossible and I think denigrates humanity as a whole. (I had the same thought when I was 14: if we could raise someone with no preconceived notions of the world, would he even have to obey gravity? I thought, maybe no. But now? Of course he would. Even if he has no idea that he’s just kicking around on the floor, that’s what he’s doing.)

Being immortal is interesting, because at what point do you stop aging? Is it when you hit your peak and your prime? So a bunch of 18 year old looking men and 35 year old looking women? MILF Island anyone?

… and well, I’m hoping there are pubs and cafes, and hard ciders (I don’t drink beer), in Heaven… that and winged horses.

You’re looking at it from our own clouded viewpoint, Eric. I understand, it’s our experiences that make up our brain (or the connections therein), and our nurture that dictates how we react to given situations. But what if… (what if!) we get to the stage where we can create something (I know, I shouldn’t be abstracting: some PERSON) with purely rational axioms?

‘Gravity does this.’
‘A + B = C’

The problem we have, having grown up and continued to live in this world, is that we’re made up of irrational calculations: ‘That little spider’s capable of killing me!’ Obviously, it’s outside our realm of science at the moment, and way outside our ability to comprehend — it’s just rhetorical, as you say!

Immortal in prison… nice imagery, Eric. But again, who’s to say we’d commit any crimes if we could live forever? Kurt Vonnegut wrote a couple of interesting short stories about immortality and body/soul separation — worth reading, especially if you love dark and scathing observation (just read Welcome to the Monkey House, the short story compilation).

Rini — who knows if we’ll be able to turn back the affect of aging, or if we’ll just… remain old. I’d assume it’s mostly about replacing the organs that deteriorate — your heart — and then just getting a lot of face-lifts…! I also wonder if neurons have a particular lifespan — I know they’re the only cells that aren’t regenerated, but… if they die… well, there might be a few problems with immortality

Why would you want to create someone who was purely rational? And are we talking straight man-calculator, or what? I don’t think you’re gonna get any new ideas out of something that operates on programmed parameters. Pal.

What’s the learning curve gonna be on immortality? I’m betting you’ll have at least fifty years of people shaking off the old world, still murdering, raping, etc. And whether you live forever or not, you still need material goods. Food, shelter. Reason for theft, right there. Murder too, really. And you’ll need a cure for boredom. It’ll be the start of Deathrace 2000.

If we’re getting bionics. I want to go all out… talk about increased stamina! Plus the strength to do certain standing things you mentioned previously… but yes, maybe this is a discussion for another time…

We’re talking someone that really is outside the box, Eric! True, contemporary computers can only give a range of answers within its parameters, but I doubt we’re that far away from computers that can also think outside of the box — like us, but without all of the strings attached.

We can’t possibly predict that immortality will do, Eric. For all we know, people might all run into the seas and see just how immortal they are. Or we might all try to climb Everest.

Every day I witness ‘miracles’, someone who is revived, a child that is born – all are ‘miracles’, in my heart at least. In my head its all science or nature doing its thang. I’d love to think there is a God or whatever you’d want to call it who gave us the ability to discover things (science), that it was God who gave us the ability to reason (though a lot of our reasoning could be called into question) and that ultimately if we’re all assholes in this life we’ll have someone to answer to in the ‘next phase’. But is my reasoning purely because there is a God giving me this ability to question or is this an evolutionary thing and if so, is this what was intended by God? (what’s in a name?)

Next thing we know is that the ageing process will be slowed, not halted as I would assume that might be a Godly thing and if there is a God then I’m not sure that She (yeah yeah, she might has the lady bumps) would want us to be immortal, that would make us God-like.
Believing in a God/Gods is the biggest ‘miracle’ of all. It requires huge leaps of faith to even attempt to believe in something that we cant see and we only have the word of a few dead people, some scratchings on papyrus and some ancient graffiti on stone. But can all these people be wrong? And they all believed in an after-life, in a sense, immortality.

I’d love to think that there’s some where with all the people I’ve ever loved living it up, being immortal. But I’d also like to believe that fairy tale I buy into every December.

Tilda: that’s the weakness I try to define at the end of my entry (and a problem that a lot of philosophers tend to run into) — we can only define things, problems, relationships in terms we can understand. We can’t say ‘something happens JUST BECAUSE’, we have to… define it… we have to give it a measurable quality. And that’s why science laughs at the concept of God, or spirituality, because… well, it/he/she simply doesn’t exist, in our current universe.

That’s not to say there won’t be a God, or that there hasn’t always been gods, but it’s pretty safe to assume that most wild and wacky ‘miracles’ just get swept tidily under the large, furry carpet of ‘Oh, that’s God at work’.

That’s the other problem, Andhari, and the one that many writers have looked at it — what if only YOU were immortal, but everyone else wasn’t (vampires/undead have this problem!) I think if everyone were immortal, things would be quite different… I have no idea how different of course, but…

I think The Terminator pretty much lives forever, Sarah… But whether he/she/it has the presence of mind to know that they are alive… for all eternity… who knows!

This question, I personally find, also sets the foundation for another equally important question “what is our purpose” or “what is it we need to achieve in life?”. If the answer is not one particular thing you can attribute to everyone in the world, but is different for each person, depending on this truth, would we then wish for immortality?

I myself am not a religious person, yet I live my life with the understanding that people need a belief for a direction in life, for hope and perhaps even an escape from the fear of death itself. Maybe the need to lead an active life and live it to its fullest is driven by our mortality and that without this we wouldn’t burn so bright as we would currently, instead to smoulder away our days endlessly?

My own belief is that at least by treating people well and looking after my friends, that by putting another persons need above my own for what I deem to be the right reasons, that I am least doing something positive. it seems right.

I’ve always felt that I could do more however, never been happy with just working away my days in IT for a company that sells a product I couldn’t give a toss about. Maybe a new direction in life is required? Perhaps there is a certain irony in our mortality that is revealed to us on our deathbed. All these questions, yet without answers to them I suppose I can at least settle for burning quite brightly in the course of my lifetime.

I’m not generally in the business of writing essays when one or two words will do, but anyway:

‘Is it ethical for us to live forever?’

This is an example of a question which is not worth asking. Ethics are a special class of ideas. Ideas can be observed to evolve in a fashion analogous (but not identical) to biological organisms. There is no objective scale of truth for ethical ideas, but memetically speaking there is only one possible outcome: before long, everyone who genuinely believes it is unethical to live forever will be dead. You might just as well ask if it is ethical to be alive at all. It’s a forgone conclusion. Nobody has any choice in the matter.

There is of course at least one obvious way to rephrase the question such that nobody will fail to get the correct answer, so really you’re just playing with semantics :).

‘Do we have the technology and the resources to sustain 40, 50, 60 billion people here on Earth?’

No. We don’t have the technology and the resources to sustain 6 billion now. Is it ethical to keep having children? Objectively speaking it looks like we probably at least ought to reign it in a bit, but memetically speaking it will be a long time before the idea of not having children becomes viable.

‘Perhaps most importantly: would we do anything today if we could always put it off until tomorrow?’

Yes. Clearly. But does it matter? If someone is so dull and unimaginative that they’d do nothing all day, that would appear to be their look-out.

‘It’s impossible for me to claim there’s a world beyond our own, but if science and technology has shown us anything in the last 50 years: don’t place any bets.’

Um, well, science has shown us *lots* of worlds beyond our own, starting with the stars, moving onto planets, then galaxies, now we’re pretty sure there’s more than one universe, and it’s looking like our own might unexpectedly be teeming with life. If you mean that science might one day prove the existence of a soul, then I’m afraid I feel safe betting against you, because you really are stretching credibility. We might not know exactly how the brain works, but we’ve got a pretty good idea of the nuts and bolts, and it’s all depressingly deterministic. I didn’t really have any choice but to write this, because certain nerve signals flashed in response to certain external stimuli, which caused certain neurons to fire, and so on. That doesn’t seem to leave much room for me to have a soul or free will any more than does a desktop computer.

For someone who (I assume) has never been Catholic and has thus never donated to a Catholic church, you are awfully bitter about these priests who are supposedly rolling in the dough tithed from the poor.

“but as they can’t seem to agree, and kill each other over the minutiae, it’s likely that none of them are right.”
Really? Please explain why disagreement makes all theories involved less likely to be correct. I only bother you with these comments because I find it quite jarring when something doesn’t hold up to scrutiny in an otherwise intelligent and insightful essay.

The real point of your post, though, was about immortality. I think we humans have done a very good job of coming up with reasons why immortality is a bad thing–everything would stagnate, we’d become lazy and bored, etc.–because it has always seemed impossible anyway, and we wanted to find ways to feel good about death. But if immortality were to become a possibility, we would reevaluate the advantages and disadvantages. Is immortality ethical? That’s a sticky one. Killing is unethical. Prolonging someone’s life through healthy living and medical care is ethical. If immortality is unethical, how do we draw that line?

it’s posts like these that make me feel COMPLETELY inadequate as a blogger. haha. just wanted to share that, for one.

and for two. i wouldn’t WANT to live forever. i mean… this life is tough enough as it is. why would i want to drag that on forever? of course, it helps that i believe in God and salvation and Heaven and the like, where i see some people here don’t. i have a glorious eternity to look forward to, why would i want to waste more time here than necessary?

that aside, VERY well written. i was completely drawn into it. and what makes it more fun is now that i’ve heard you speak, i simply imagine you reading this to me. is that a little creepy? i don’t know. probably. though it’s intended to be more a compliment of your voice and whatnot. i like to hear what other people sound like. blogging does NOT make that simple. ha.

I won’t respond to everything in the last few comments because it would probably dwarf the blog entry itself…

There’s no way such a topic, the focus of billions of people and thousands of scientists since time begun can be covered in just 1 or 2 words, Dan! Perhaps you mean that enough has been said at other times and in different places that my questions are just a bit banal — that’s possible!

By a ‘world beyond our own’, I did actually mean ‘a world beyond our current reign’. I knew as I wrote it that I should’ve made it more clear. I’m certain there is, in fact, life on Maaaars. Sorry, distracted by Bowie. You basically inverted everything that I said, and confirmed what Eric and I mused: we’re blinkered by being stuck behind these fleshy orbs that we call eyes, and the walnut-like folds of our brain. Of course, this argument is never going to go anywhere. But you really can’t claim something is impossible or untrue just because it hasn’t happened yet; leaps of faith are tricky, I know, but vital.

Eleni, I’m not Catholic, but I have seen and experienced sizable donations given to a variety of churches. I won’t expand any further on that, but you are right in your assessment that I am bitter…!

If religion A says that God IS a bunch of things, and then religion B says God ACTUALLY isn’t like that — how can either of them be right? The supposition of God’s existence, as some kind of all-knowing, ever-present entity means that definition is not up for ‘grabs’. He is, or he isn’t. Sure, our interpretations of Him vary — some of us think he’s merciful, some of us think he’s vengeful — but… these are human interpretations. The interpretations of high priests. As you know, I think the downfall of most civilisations is due to the meddlin’ of high priests.

Of course, there might be 1 or 2 accurate descriptions of God, or spirituality — a scatter-gun approach, eh? — but trying to find out which ones are correct is an impossible task, as there’s so much falsity in circulation. Unless, of course, EVERYTHING said about God/gods is true…

Cari, I thought you might find this one interesting — and I hoped I wouldn’t upset religious types, either. I tried to include more than one religion in the rant, just to make sure I didn’t appear prejudiced Just imagine, if you meet the love of your life — a true love, the kind of love that you NEVER want to end — wouldn’t you want to live forever with that person?

Sure, if you’re into the whole ‘living is sufferance’, then death and Heaven sounds like a sweet deal. But if you like living…

I felt that my first point was summarised pretty well by just simplifying the ‘Is it ethical…?’ question to ‘Is it ethical to be alive?’. But maybe not.

We’ve known for a *very* long time that there’s ‘a world’ beyond our reign. By any sensible definition, our ‘reign’ doesn’t even include the entire Earth — by a long way — never mind the countless galaxies of the universe, probable parallel universes, etc. So, sorry, I still don’t get your point…